In accordance with the improvement in functions of mobile information terminals, image data which has typically been received by large information terminals such as desktop PCs becomes receivable and viewable by mobile information terminals such as mobile phones.
Since a mobile information terminal has a small display screen, characters in an image to be viewed may be blurred due to downsizing of the image and may not be illegible.
In this regard, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 2003-108284 (published on Apr. 11, 2003) discloses an image display apparatus arranged such that a display area of the image display apparatus is divided into two areas, and an image is displayed in one sub display area whereas a, character string in the image is displayed in the other sub display area.
This conventional art, however, is disadvantageous in that, since the size of the sub display area for character string is fixed, the sub display area may not be possible to display all of the character string if the number of the characters is large or if the character size is increased in consideration of viewability. Also, on the other hand, when the number of characters to be displayed is small, a redundant part of the sub display area cannot be used for displaying an image. The display area is therefore not effectively used.